It was just a short time ago that dipping pizza in ranch was the Great Debate, with many claiming that the act was an abomination to pies everywhere. Now, the ranch-pizza combo is an integral part of the pizza experience — it's even found on the menus of many sophisticated restaurants.
But it's important to ask how something that elicits such an emotional response from diners became a mainstream option — so much so that before you hit the "place order" button in your delivery pizza app, you're probably adding a couple cups of dipping sauce to the list. America's four largest pizza chains — Papa John's, Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Domino's — all offer ranch along with a variety of dips on their menus, tiny upsells that contribute to the $45.15 billion in pizza restaurant sales in 2016. But how did we get here?
It Starts With Breadsticks
According to Saint Joseph's University professor of food marketing John Stanton, asking "Which came first, consumer demand or restaurant upsell?" is like saying "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" It's impossible to know, but in food marketing, products tend to become popular because of both consumer demand and restaurants looking to increase profits. "All companies are always looking for something new, a different edge," Stanton says. "If [the product] becomes something that people will pay for and expect, eventually you'll see it in more places."
This is how Pizza Hut, founded in 1958, came to offer dipping sauces: due to customer demand. The chain started as a dine-in restaurant in Wichita, Kansas, and has offered warm marinara with its breadsticks and garlic bread since opening. "Warm marinara is one of the most beloved and requested items at Pizza Hut," says director of public relations Doug Terfehr.
Although Pizza Hut was the first chain to serve breadsticks with sauce (which it would later add to dishes like cheese sticks and garlic knots), it was the Detroit-based Little Caesars, founded just one year after Pizza Hut, in 1959, that first succeeded in marketing dips as essential add-ons. The company introduced Crazy Bread, essentially garlic breadsticks, as a side dish in 1982. For three years, the sticks stood alone, but in 1985, the chain introduced the option of adding Crazy Sauce, a slightly altered marinara that's similar to what's on its standard pizza, for a small fee.
But it's Papa John's that gets credit for first creating and marketing a dip specifically for pizza, dislodging the dip from its usual place as a breadstick side.
According to "chief ingredient officer" Sean Muldoon, the brand's popular garlic dipping sauce is as old as Papa John's itself, and since Papa John's founder John Schnatter made it in 1984, it has been included with every pizza ever sold. The tangy dip has a consistency that is a little thicker than melted butter, but not as thick as buttermilk ranch, and it tastes like a mixture of equal parts butter, garlic, and salt.
Muldoon says the recipe has changed a little over time, and was recently updated to comply with the brand's new clean-label standard — meaning partially hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, and synthetic colors have all been removed — but the bones of it have stayed the same. "The garlic butter sauce has proven to be a perfect complement to our pizza crust," Muldoon says. "Some people love dipping the crust so much, they'll do this first, before eating the pizza."
Escalation
After Papa John's launched its signature pizza dip and Little Caesars debuted Crazy Sauce the following year, dips proliferated. "Some people like to try new things and some people like to try what other people like," Stanton says; pizza dips appealed to both of those groups. Papa John's is still the only major chain that includes a custom sauce specifically made for its pizza, but Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Domino's all offer a slew of sauces, sold separately, that you can order with any of their menu items for a small upcharge.
Incremental Upsells
Although upsells are offered throughout all levels of cuisine (ever notice how a restaurant's specials are more expensive than what's on the menu?), online ordering has made small, incremental add-ons easier to sell. According to Stanton, the average basket size of online orders is always larger than what people buy in stores, and the same can be said for food. In 2014, Domino's spokesperson Chris Brandon told Fast Company that the chain's successful app increased add-on sales. In that same piece, a representative from online-delivery service Eat24 reported that online ordering helped diners "try stuff you never thought about ordering over the phone, and that's something we see across the board at all restaurants."
Dipping sauces are now sewn into the pizza-ordering experience. If you place an order online with most pizza chains, you'll get a prompt that asks if you want to add x sauce for x cents more. Eaters might feel like they are getting a good deal, because if you're already spending $20 on a pizza, what's the harm in trying a new 50-cent lemon pepper dip?
